So, waking up this morning to prepare for the first day of the MySQL Conference, the first news I pick up is that it's now Oracle Conference instead. Been speaking with a few people through the day and confusion as to how this is going to impact the company, development community, users or customers reigns. Personally, I'm more apprehensive than excited about it at this point - but frankly, I've spent more time thinking of how to apply MapReduce to large-scale ETL processes than about the acquisition today.

However, I'll keep digesting this for a while, and hopefully after a couple of days of discussing it with people here I can form a better opinion. I don't know Oracle that well - it never seemed like a very easily approachable company to me, and what connection I've had with the technology its felt a bit baroque and legacy, but I haven't even looked at it in a few years. It is interesting though - Oracle's acquisition of InnoDB a couple of years back was certainly one reason why there's today a number of development projects for other transactional storage engines for MySQL. Sun has been an active corporate sponsor to a number of such projects, and it doesn't seem very likely that Oracle would want to continue that. Dunno.